1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to vehicle parking and, more particularly, to a method system and social platform for enabling participating members to equitably and efficiently disseminate parking location information in a timely manner.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, the operation of a vehicle in densely populated or urban areas can be expensive and time consuming. In many of these areas, the price of garage space is prohibitively expensive. Often, there is an overall perception that there are more vehicles than affordable parking solutions.
An increase of the urban population entails a corresponding increase in the number of motor vehicles. As a result, motorists will spend significantly more time and resources inefficiently searching for a place to park. In one urban area within the United States, e.g., New York City (NYC) or Manhattan, the search for a place to park can take anywhere from approximately 20 minutes to one hour, depending on the time of day. Various searching methods emerged shaped uniquely for each driver by gut feel and past success, but at a high level most strategies were divided between a “sit-and-wait” vs a “circling” approach. When queried, almost all drivers express stress, not time or fuel consumption, as the worst part of locating a parking spot or place to park.
In the example of Manhattan as the urban setting, certain statistical variable are known from Internet websites, such as ParkMe. For example, the average hourly parking in a region of Manhattan known as the Upper West Side (UWS), the fee for parking a vehicle is $17.34 per hour, the average daily parking fee is $27.60 per day, the average overnight parking fee is $37.51 per night, the average monthly parking is $574.71, and the average fee for on street metered parking is $1 to $5.00 for a time period of one hour.
In Manhattan, moreover, the population of this section of New York City is dynamic and fluctuates based on weekday, weekend weeknight. For example, on a weekday the population of Manhattan can comprise 1.6 million commuting workers, 778,000 visitors and 1.46 million residents. This number changes on the weekend, where the population can comprise 565,000 commuting workers, 778,000 visitors and 1.54 million residents. Lastly, on a weeknight the population of Manhattan can comprise zero commuting workers, 436,000 visitors and 1.58 million residents. Of the Manhattan population, approximately 16.2% commute by car, approximately 23% own cars or motor vehicles, and there are roughly 3.4 to 4.4 million locations available for parking on the streets of NYC.
The parking situation in various urban areas, such as NYC or Manhattan, has given rise to the question of whether technology can be used to help alleviate the problem. Currently, several conventional solutions are offered to combat the parking problem, e.g., Primospot, Spot Hero, Streetline, Monkey Parking, SpotSwitch and Haystack.
Each of these solutions fall into one of several categories, e.g., the “Garage Solution”, “Supplemental Hardware Methods”, the “Acquire and Sell model” and the “Community Model”. While these models or conventional solutions do provide a remedy to parking within an urban environment, they do nevertheless fail to adequately address the problem.
Of the Garage Solutions, the best of these services allow a motorist to secure garage spots while in transit and at a discount. It is apparent what is provided by the garage solution provides little with respect to locating an on-street location at which to park.
Streetline and others have adopted hardware assisted solutions. However, these solutions are complex and require the “buy-in” of municipalities. Moreover, these solutions are heavily dependent upon VC capital and manufacturing.
With respect to the “Acquire and Sell Models”, Monkeyparking requires a holder of a parking location to auction their spot to the highest bidders, while with ParkModo holders of parking locations are paid to relinquish their parking spots to ParkModo which then auctions the spots to the highest bidder. Besides incurring the wrath of municipalities and bloggers, it is highly doubtful these conventional methods adequately accounts for user context. Moreover, these solutions are too slow to meet the needs of most users.
Another “Acquire and Sell Model” is Heystack. The drawbacks of this solution are clear because this model is now “shuttered” under municipal pressure; parking location holder impermissibly sold parking spots to each other.
Lastly, the community models iSpotSwap and Spotswitch broadcast parking spot availability to everyone instead of controlling the process. By broadcasting parking location availability to everyone, however, these conventional solutions increase stress for the many while rewarding the few.